D&D and Me: Part 1 (The Time Beforetimes)

[This is the first post in a new series.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[This series is about my discovery of and (occasionally stormy) love affair with D&D.  You may wish to think of it as an alternative to 23andMe, since D&D is embedded far deeper in my DNA than any silly “chromosomes.” Or think of it as a complement to my series on the Other Blog “Perl and Me.” This will probably be a bit shorter than most of my series.  Probably.]

I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with Dungeons & Dragons—or “D&D” for those in the know—for most of my life.  For a long time, I took a detour into Heroscape, and I still love (and play) that game too.  But I’m entering a more “on-again” phase, mainly in that I’ve (finally!) discovered the joy of watching people play online.¹  As I’m always interested to find out more about the people behind the art I enjoy—whether that’s musicians, authors, filmmakers, or what-have-you—I’ve also spent a little bit of time listening to some of these people I’m watching talk about how they got into D&D.  And that made me want to tell someone how I got into D&D.  So here I am, telling you.

Because I never met a tangent I didn’t like, I have to start with the pre-D&D stuff.  There were lots of interests that came before I even heard about D&D, and lots of intersecting interests and interests that grew out of it.  Any story about a thing is always about more than just that thing.  For me, as a very young child, the two most important pieces were no doubt fantasy and horror.  And for that we need to talk about books.

I was an only child for the first 11 years of my life, and, while I loved games, I rarely had anyone to play with.  I didn’t make friends very easily, and I was a very short kid, and quite sensitive about it.  So I spent a lot of time by myself, and most of that time I spent reading books.  In my house, movies were awesome, and we went to see quite a few, and television was awesome, and we watched quite a lot of it, and music was intensely important—I may have mentioned before that my father was a record collector—and we listened to a shit-ton of that, but books were king.  No one ever discouraged me from reading comic books, or watching cartoons, or any of that stuff (my dad, in fact, had been fond of comics himself as a kid, so I think he was secretly a bit happy when I started to get into comics), but it was just always clear that books were the ultimate medium.  Everything else was second tier ... at best.  We had entire walls of our house devoted to books, as well as books in cabinets, books in boxes, bookcases stashed into odd corners ... books everywhere.  I had a bookcase in my room as well, of course, and the very first book I can remember reading, after all the Dr. Suess and P. D. Eastman and Berenstain Bears, was a book on Norse mythology.  It was a book aimed at younger readers, so it was a bit watered down, but I learned a lot about Odin and Thor and Loki before I ever saw them in the pages of a Marvel comic.  From there I gave up on the kids’ versions and starting reading Bulfinch’s and Larousse.  It was a short hop from there to The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Probably around the same time, I started getting into comics.  However, I always had a very weird approach to buying comic books: if the cover featured anyone even remotely recognizable—your Supermans, your Batmans, your Spider-Mans, your Fours of the Fantastic variety—I didn’t care much about them.  I wanted comics with pictures of heroes I had never seen before, never even heard of before.  The first comic I can ever remember buying was Atlas #1: that Jack Kirby artwork is always an eye-catcher, I was of course familiar with the name from my studies in mythology, and I had inherited enough of the collector gene to know that a #1 issue could become a valuable commodity ... even at 8 years old, which is how old I must’ve been, according to Wikipdedia’s publication date.  From then on, I would buy anything that had a superhero or two—or, even better, a whole bunch!—that I had absolutely no idea who they were.  It’s why I bought the “origin” issue of Black Orchid, and Ragman #1, and Moon Knight #1, and absolutely why I got into the Legion of Super-Heroes and the original Guardians of the Galaxy.  Teams of misfits with weird powers appealed to me, and really the only truly popular characters I ever liked were the X-Men, and that was only because they rebooted the group with a a whole new batch of crazy unknown heroes—mostly non-American, even!²  Not my fault they got all popular after that.

It’s worth asking why I was only interested in the weird, unknown heroes, and I’m not entirely sure I have a good answer.  But I have a theory.  See, as a kid, I was a little OCD—had I been born 25 years or so later, I might have been diagnosed as being on the spectrum, at least a little.  ADHD at the very least.  But, anyway, one of the ways in which my particular brand of OCD manifested was in my obsession with lists.  My mother would indulge me in this (or maybe she was indulging her own predilection for having children able to recite things back to her, who knows) by teaching me various lists of things.  First she taught me how to count to 10 in Spanish.  Then in French.  Then in German.  Then in Malaysian.³  Then she taught me the Greek alphabet.  Then the books of the Bible.  Then all the US Presidents.  Then she sort of ran out of things to teach me and I started chasing lists on my own.

I always loved animals, so I started reading this set of wildlife encyclopedias we had lying around.  But trying to come up with a list of all the animals in the world isn’t like coming up with a list of all the presidents: we don’t even know all the species of animals at any given time—a fact which was already blowing my young mind—not to mention the fact that the list is constantly changing as new species spring into existence or go extinct.⁴  And when it comes to classification, the classic Linnaean taxonomy (phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) held strong appeal for my orderly brain, but it turns out that people were always fighting over what went where.⁵  The main controversy I recall was that rabbits were put into the “new” order of lagomorpha, although the books made it clear that some taxonomists might still be hanging on to the “outdated” idea that they were rodents.  This pretty much blew my mind, since of course my mother had taught me that rabbits were rodents, and common sense told me they were rodents: I mean, come on, they’re small furry creatures with big buck teeth—of course they’re rodents!  But apparently scientists not only knew otherwise ... they had once believed it and then changed their minds.  Insanity.

I fared no better trying to learn the countries of the world.  Surely this was an area where one could come up with a clear list.  And yet ... was Estonia a country?  They had an embassy in the US, but the UN didn’t recognize them.  What about the Bantustans of South Africa?  The opinion of my brand-spanking-new World Book Encyclopedias was that two of them (Lesotho and Swaziland⁶) were countries, but the remainder (such as Bophuthatswana and Transkei) weren’t.  Plus South Africa had two capital cities: how was that supposed to fit into my nice listing of countries and their capitals?  And it continued to get worse: every year they would send us “year books” with updated and entirely new articles, and they actually came with little sheets of stickers you were supposed to stick in the margins of the main encyclopedias, alerting you to an updated section for this article or a whole new article between these other two articles.  I very diligently applied all these stickers for many years, and I distincly remember when the update for 1979 came in and there was a whole new article for St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which was apparently an entirely new country ... one year, no country; next year: country.  Mind.  Blown.

Somehow I didn’t melt down and throw a tantrum when I discovered this.  I just began to chase the lists even harder.  I think I somehow (probably subconsciously) believed I could eventually find all the members and learn all the classification controversies and make my own decisions and then I—alone in the world!—would be the knower of the complete list of X.  Where “X” might be animals, or countries, or perhaps superheroes.  Thus my theory that the lists were responsible for my comic-book-purchasing habits.  No point in buying a “regular” issue of Spider-Man—I already knew who that guy was—but an issue with these new guys Cloak and Dagger ... now there was something adding to my quest to know the complete list of superheroes.

Surely even you, dear reader—used to my tangents are you no doubt by now are—are wondering how on earth this relates to D&D.  For that, we need to look at the other half of my interest: horror.

My parents loved horror.  They enjoyed fantasy, and sci-fi probably even more so, but horror was their true calling.  I started reading Stephen King and Peter Straub and Dean R. Koontz⁷ at a very young age, and we would go see horror movies like crazy.  I saw The Exorcist in the theater, at a time when I must have just barely turned 7, and The Legend of Hell House, and Jaws, and Burnt Offerings, and Prophecy, and Grizzly, and Day of the Animals, and It’s Alive (in roughly decreasing order of quality) ... all in the theater.  At home on the small screen, we watched even more: I remember Twilight Zone reruns, and I remember Night Gallery, and most of all I remember Kolchak: The Night Stalker, in which a Chicago reporter for a tiny newspaper managed to encounter a different supernatural threat every single week.  His editor (who was properly grumpy and talked primarily out of the side of his mouth, as all good Chicago news editors should) would yell at him about his “cockamamie stories”⁸ and how “ya got no proof!” The problem with a monster-of-the-week show that you’re supposed to be taking seriously, though, is that unless your protagonist is actually some sort of professional monster hunter (see also: Buffy), or perhaps even is one of the monsters themselves (see also: Dark Shadows⁹), it starts to strain credulity after a while.  Of course, as a kid, that was not an issue for me.  The bigger problem was that you eventually start to run out of monsters ... or at least out of monsters anyone’s ever heard of.  Partially they solved this problem by occasionally making up monsters—my favorite was the updated take on the Headless Horseman, who was now a headless motorcycle rider with a big sword, zooming around decapitating people—but also they went scouring the cultures of the world for more obscure monsters.  Manitou, rakshasa, succubus ... all these I first became familiar with as a result of avidly watching The Night Stalker.  It was only on for one season, but it was a pivotal moment in my personal history.

Because now, you see, I had a new list to make: a list of all possible monsters.

Next week, we’ll see how that pretty inexorably leads to my discovery of Dungeons and Dragons.

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1 Most likely we’ll get into why it took me so long—I mean, Critical Role has been a thing for 4 years already—in a later entry in the series.

2 I can’t remember whether Thunderbird considered himself American or not, but at most 2 out of 8.  Still nearly 90% male, of course, but it was still the seventies: “progressive” hadn’t yet progressed all that far.

3 My grandfather was stationed in Malaysia during WWII and taught her when she was little.  It’s the only one of the four languages I can’t remember today, as it happens: I don’t remember much, but I do remember that the words for numbers were multisyllabic, and that always seemed really weird to me.

4 Honestly, there were similar problems with some of my other lists—Ancient Greek had some letters that didn’t survive to the modern Greek alphabet, so do we count those letters or not? and don’t even get me started on the Apocrypha—but I was never aware of those at the time.

5 Nowadays, biologists have all but abandoned this amount of orderliness for a much more flexible system: clades.  While it’s a much better system for trying to organize the multiplicity of life, which is by its nature chaotic, it would have been anathema to my OCD mind at that age.  Luckily, while the book that would eventuallyt inspire cladistics had apparently already been written, it didn’t start to gain traction until I was out of college and could no longer be offended by its conceptually infinite branchings.

6 Note that modern-day Wikipedia tells us that these two countries were never Bantustans; perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t recall the World Book making this fine distinction.

7 A.k.a. the first 3 of what would ultimately become my pentagram of literary idols.

8 Note: not necessarily an actual quote.  My memory does not really extend back that far, although I have rewatched a few episodes for nostalgia’s sake.

9 Which I also remember watching, at least a bit.